Please find below a series of recommendations for appropriate conduct and approach within this specialised forum.

1. Be nice to each other

Basic interpersonal decency must be observed within this forum. Feel free to attack the ideas of others, but never attack them personally, either directly or by inference. This need for interpersonal decency extends also to those who may have originally conceived the ideas being debated (e.g. the Buddha, commentators, bhikkhus, scholars).

2. If you notice that Point 1 is not being observed...

Use the Report Post function and we will attend to your report as quickly as practicable, given our available staff. Please do not publicly quote and object to the content of a post, because this then embeds it within the flow of conversation and it becomes difficult for moderators to extract the offending material without disrupting the thread. Public complaints, regardless of how legitimate, tend to take threads off-topic and have a tendency to become a sideshow unto themselves.

3. The Open Dhamma forum may not be suitable for everyone

The purpose of this sub-forum is to openly permit important and challenging discussion on the Dhamma. By establishing a particular forum as a "Free-For-All", albeit one where members must still be nice to each other, we aim to keep other areas of the site free from vociferous debate. We have attempted to establish an appropriate time and place for everything, with well established boundaries that will be enforced. Therefore, if you deem that vociferous debate is not conducive to your practice, you have the opportunity to fine tune your experience at Dhamma Wheel by sticking to forums better aligned with your practice that will be protected from such intense debate.

If you have asked me of the origination of unease, then I shall explain it to you in accordance with my understanding: Whatever various forms of unease there are in the world, They originate founded in encumbering accumulation. (Pārāyanavagga)

Exalted in mind, just open and clearly aware, the recluse trained in the ways of the sages:One who is such, calmed and ever mindful, He has no sorrows! -- Udana IV, 7